I have had the dreaded lifter tap ever since I had cams put in. I was totally annoyed by the noise so I installed the Jackson Auto Machine lifters this morning, and bam the lifter tap is gone! The thing was all of my stock lifters checked out ok, except one on the intake side was alittle weak, but held pressure. I installed them with the cams in the car, very easily. I built pressure back up in the lifters asper the factory procedure and now I have no more tapping. I had a talk with Carmella @ Jackson and she had some interesting things to say about the HKS 272 cams. She told me that the reason some 4g63's have the tap and some dont is do to the acceptable tolerances HKS will let there cams out the factory with. No matter if the lifters are bled properly or not some will make the lifters tap. She told me that she couldnt garantee(?) the car would stop tapping with their lifters, but alot of people have had luck, so I tried them and they worked. Another approach she metioned was machining .0030 off the bottoms of the stock lifters to help with the problem.

One thing I did notice about the Jackson lifters is that they have a tremendous amount of travel compared to the oem lifters. I called HKS USA yesterday and talked to a tech rep about the varying tolerances of their cams and he did confirm it. He didnt have the tolerance limits onhand and is going to email them to me, Ill post them once I get them. In any type of manufacturing process there are acceptable deviations (tolerances) from the standard but damn. If their tolerances are large enough to make some lifters tap and some not, I find that unacceptable. That brings me back to another concern, about valvespring tension and these cams. I read a thread by timzcat comparing Revolver cams to HKS cams:

https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/sh...light=Revolver

He states that after running the hks cams on the stock valvesprings for a extended period of time he noticed a lot of wear to the valveg guides and other things. And another possible problem is that the stock valvetrain is setup to run hollow cams, and the hks cams are solid. There is a definite weight difference, the stock spring tension is relatively light in comparison. HKS states these cams can be ran on the stock valvetrain, Im starting to wonder if a catastrophic failure is waiting in the future for alot of us running these cams. I think my next upgrade is gong to be my springs and retainers. Just some info for you guys and some stuff to thinks about.

Thanks timzcat and dryad001 for answering all my questions

 

Ill have to keep them in mind, thanks for the info. One trick that worked for me was adding a little Lucas Synthetic oil treatment, and my tap was virtually eliminated. Cheap and easy to do.

 

Did you guys have lifter tap the whole time the engine would run? I have a tapping noise but usually only when the engine is warming up

 

Mine would come and go, mainly in warmup. But even that was eliminated with the Lucas

 

I'm pretty sure the weight of the camshaft has nothing to do with wear on the valve guides. The cam bearings support the weight of the camshaft not the valve or the springs.

I could see a minor decrease in engine response from the additional rotating weight of solid cams but, its such a small area where the additional weight is I think you wouldbe very hard pressed to tell.

I'm sure it's the increased lift and more aggressive ramp that accelerates wear on the valvetrain.

Good info in the rest of the post though.

 

I am on the same page as you. I think the wear is do to the lift also. I mention the weight just because the spring tension is alittle weak and I thought it might have to do with the hollw stock cams. Just thoughts. But I definitely agree it is the aggressive cam causeing wear

 

Great post, I am having the same problems as you so I guess its time for some new lifters and if you don't mind me, how much did they run you

 

Thanks for that info. My lifters make noise somtimes as well. I was asking about using the lucas treatment for lifter noise before but didn't get an response in here. I will try it and see what happens.

 

which of the lucas products are you planning on using, I see a bunch of different oil additives on there. I tried the stp one and it didn't do anything thus far.

 

+1 for the locas treatment, it worked good for me too still had some noise but not as much.

 

I was curious about lucas too. I know recently I saw synthetic oil additive, I think someone mentioned it above. Pepboys has it, but Im leary of using additives in my engine. Supposed lucas works wonders, alot of use it. Might have to check it out if my lifters go haywire again. So far so good though.

 

Any one here use solid lifters like the ones from BLE products?
These are adjustable so you can set your own valve lash.

 

Isn't most lifter tap after cam install caused by a lack of bleeding the stock lifters before putting them back in?

I know it's not mentioned in the Evomoto.com writeup, so it seems a lot of people don't know about it.

 

Actually I see "tickers" with OE cams (bone stock heads)... kind of like I see oil leaks from OE head studs just as I've seen with some ARP's.

 

Yes that is a cause of lifters tapping, they will collapse if not bled down before a cam install. Also if they are dirty. All of my oem lifters were bled properly when the cams were initially installed. They still exhibited the tapping sound.